of sixty, they knew that they must end their lives in prison To quicken their departure from life the prison administra tion used to send them to the workshops where felt sock, were made out of all sorts of woolen refuse. The dust iz the workshop soon induced the consumption which finally released them. Then, four fellow prisoners would carry the old man to the common grave, the graveyard warder and his black dog being the only two beings to follow him; and while the prison priest marched in front of the proces. sion, mechanically reciting his prayer and looking round at the chestnut or fir trees along the road, and the four comrades carrying the coffin were enjoying the momentary freedom from confinement, the black dog would be the only being affected by the solemnity of the ceremony, When the reformed central prisons were introduced in France, it was believed that the principle of absolute silence could be maintained in them. But it is so contrary to human nature that its strict enforcement had to be aban- doned.
To the outward observer the prison seems to be quite mute; but in reality life goes on in it as busily as in a small town. In suppressed voices, by means of whispers, _ hurriedly dropped words, and scraps of notes, all news of any interest spreads immediately throughout the prison. Nothing can happen either among the prisoners themselves, or in the “cour @’honneur,” where the lodgings of the adminis- tration are situated, or in the village of Clairvaux, or in- the wide world of Paris politics, that is not communicated at once throughout all the dormitories, workshops, and cells.
Frenchmen are too communicative to admit of their underground telegraph ever being stopped. We had no inter-_ course with the common-law prisoners, and yet we knew all the news of the day. “J ohn, the gardener, is back for two.; years.” “Such an inspector’s wife has had a fearful scrimes a COMMUNICATION AMONG PRISONERS 465 age with So and So’s wife.” ‘James, in the cells, has en caught transmitting a note of friendship to John of the ymers’ workshop.” ‘That old beast So and So is no nger Minister of Justice; the ministry was upset;” and ‘on; and when the word goes that “Jack has got two re-penny packets of tobacco in exchange for two flannel ckets,” it makes the tour of the prison very quickly. On te occasion a petty lawyer, detained in the prison, wished transmit to me a note, in order to ask my wife, who was aying in the village, to see from time to time his wife, ho was also there, — and quite a number of men took the veliest interest in the transmission of that message, which id to pass through I don’t know how many hands before ‘reached me. When there was something that might ecially interest us in a paper, this paper, in some un- countable way, would reach us, wrapped about a little one and thrown over the high wall.
Confinement in a cell is no obstacle to communication. 7hen we came to Clairvaux and were first lodged in the ular quarter, it was bitterly cold in the cells; so cold, ideed, that I could hardly write, and when my wife, who as then at Paris, got my letter, she did not recognize my andwriting. The order came to heat the cells as much as ossible; but do what they might, the cells remained as ld as ever. It appeared afterwards that all the hot air ibes were choked with scraps of paper, bits of notes, pen- nives, and all sorts of small things which several genera- ons of prisoners had concealed in the pipes.
Martin, the same friend of mine whom IJ have already ientioned, obtained permission to serve part of his time in lular confinement. He preferred isolation to life in a 90m with a dozen others, and so went to acell. To his reat astonishment he found that he was not at all alone. ‘he walls and the keyholes spoke. In a short time all he inmates of the cells knew who he was, and he had 466 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST acquaintances all over the building. Quite a life goes on as in a beehive, between the seemingly isolated cells; only that life often takes such a character as to make it belon; entirely to the domain of psychopathy. Kraft-Ebbing him self had no idea of the aspects it assumes with certain prisoners in solitary confinement.
I will not repeat here what I have said in a book, “ In Russian and French Prisons,” which I published in Eng- land in 1886, soon after my release from Clairvaux, upon the moral influence of prisoners upon prisoners. But there is one thing which must be said. The prison population consists of heterogeneous elements; but, taking only those who are usually described as “the criminals” proper, and of whom we have heard so much lately from Lombroso and his followers, what struck me most as regards them was that the prisons, which are considered as preventive of anti- social deeds, are exactly the institutions for breeding them. Every one knows that absence of education, dislike of regu- lar work, physical incapability of sustained effort, misdi- rected love of adventure, gambling propensities, absence of energy, an untrained will, and carelessness about the happiness of others are the causes which bring this class of people before the courts. Now I was deeply impressed during my imprisonment by the fact that it is exactly these defects of human nature — each one of them — which the | prison breeds in its inmates; and it is bound to breed them because it is a prison, and will breed them so long as it | exists. Incarceration in a prison of necessity entirely destroys the energy of a man and annihilates his will. In _ prison life there is no room for exercising one’s will; to possess one’s own will in prison means surely to get into trouble. The will of the prisoner must be killed, and it is killed. Still less room is there for exercising one’s nat- ural sympathies, everything being done to prevent free contact with all those, outside and inside, with whom the tans THE MORAL INFLUENCE OF PRISONS 467 yrisoner may have feelings of sympathy. Physically and nentally he is rendered less and less capable of sustained ffort, and if he has had already a dislike for regular work, his dislike is only the more increased during his prison rears. Lf, before he first came to the prison, he was easily yearied by monotonous work which he could not do pro- yerly, or had an antipathy to underpaid overwork, his dis- ike now becomes hatred. If he doubted about the social itility of current rules of morality, now after having cast a sritical glance upon the official defenders of these rules, and earned his comrades’ opinions of them, he openly throws ‘hese rules overboard. And if he has got into trouble in sonsequence of a morbid development of the passionate, sensual side of his nature, now, after having spent a num- ber of years in prison, this morbid character is still more developed, in many cases to an appalling extent. In this last direction — the most dangerous of all — prison educa- tion is most effective.
In Siberia I had seen what sinks of filth and what hot- beds of physical and moral deterioration the dirty, over- crowded, ‘ unreformed”? Russian prisons were, and at the age of nineteen I imagined that if there were less over- crowding in the rooms and a certain classification of the prisoners, and if healthy occupations were provided for them, the institution might be substantially improved. Now I had to part with these illusions. I could convince myself that as regards their effects upon the prisoners and their results for society at large, the best ‘‘ reformed ”’ prisons — whether cellular or not — are as bad as, or even worse than the dirty prisons of old. They do not reform the prisoners. On the contrary, in the immense, overwhelming majority of cases they exercise upon them the most deteriorating effect. The thief, the swindler, the ‘tough, who has spent some years in a prison, comes out of it more ready than ever to resume his former career; he is 468 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST better prepared for it; he has learned to do it better; ‘he is more embittered against society, and he finds a mo 'e solid justification for being in revolt against its laws and customs; necessarily, unavoidably, he is bound to sink deeper and deeper into the anti-social acts which first brought him before a law court. The offenses he will commit after his release will inevitably be graver than those which first got him into trouble; and he is doomed to finish his life in a prison or in a hard-labor colony. In the above-mentioned book I said that prisons are “ universities of crime, maintained by the state.” And now, thinking of © it at fifteen years’ distance, in the light of my subsequent experience, I can only confirm that statement of mine. Personally, I have no reason whatever to complain of the years I spent in a French prison. For an active and independent man the restraint of liberty and activity is in itself so great a privation that all the remainder —all the petty miseries of prison life —are not worth speaking of. Of course, when we heard of the active political life which was going on in France, we resented very much our forced inactivity. The end of the first year, especially during a gloomy winter, is always hard for the prisoner. And when spring comes, one feels more strongly than ever the want of liberty. When I saw from our windows the meadows assuming their green garb, and the hills covered with a spring haze, or when I saw a train flying into a dale be- tween the hills, I certainly felt a strong desire to follow it and to breathe the air of the woods, or to be carried along | with the stream of human life in a busy town. But one who casts his lot with an advanced party must be prepared to spend a number of years in prison, and he need not grudge it. He feels that even during his imprisonment he remains not quite an inactive part of the movement which spreads and strengthens the ideas that are dear to him.
At Lyons, my comrades, my wife, and myself certainly THE CRIMINAL TYPE 469 found the warders a very rough set of men. But after a couple of encounters all was set right. Moreover the prison administration knew that we had the Paris press with us, and they did not want to draw upon themselves the thunders of Rochefort or the cutting criticisms of C@lémenceau. And at Clairvaux there was no need of such restraint. All the administration had been renewed a few months before we came thither. A prisoner had been killed by warders in his cell, and his corpse had been hanged to simulate suicide; but this time the affair leaked out through the doctor, the governor was dismissed, and altogether a better tone prevailed in the prison. I took away from Clairvaux the best recollection of its governor, and altogether, while I was there, I more than once thought ‘that, after all, men are often better than the institutions ‘they belong to. But, having no personal griefs, I can all ‘the more freely and most unconditionally condemn the institution itself as a survival from the dark past, wrong in ‘its principles, and a source of immeasurable evils to society.
One thing more I must mention, as it struck me perhaps even more forcibly than the demoralizing effects of prisons -upon their inmates. What a nest of infection is every prison -—and even every law court—for its neighborhood, for the people who live near it! Lombroso has made much of the ‘criminal type’’ which he believes he has discovered ‘amongst the inmates of the prisons. If he had made the same efforts to observe the people who hang about the law courts, — detectives, spies, petty solicitors, informers, people preying upon the simpletons, and the like, — he would probably have concluded that his criminal type has a far greater geographical extension than the prison “walls. I never saw such a collection of faces of the lowest human type as I saw around and within the Palais de Jus- tice at Lyons, — certainly not within the prison walls of Clairvaux. Dickens and Cruikshank have immortalized a 470 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST few of these types; but they represent quite a world which revolves about the law courts and infuses its infection far and wide around them. And the same is true of each cen- tral prison, like Clairvaux. It is an atmosphere of petty thefts, petty swindlings, spying and corruption of all sorts, which spreads like a blot of oil round the prison, I saw all this; and if before my condemnation I already knew that society is wrong in its present system of punish- ments, after I left Clairvaux I knew that it is not only wrong and unjust in this system, but that it is simply foolish when, in its partly unconscious and partly willful ignorance of realities, it maintains at its own expense these universities of corruption, under the illusion that they are necessary as a bridle to the criminal instincts of man.
XIV Every revolutionist meets a number of spies and “‘ agents provocateurs”’ in his way, and I have had my fair share of them. All governments spend considerable sums of money in maintaining this kind of reptile. However, they are mainly dangerous to young people only. One who has had some experience of life and men soon discovers that there is about these creatures something which puts him on his guard. They are recruited from the scum of society, amongst men of the lowest moral standard, and if one is watchful of the moral character of the men he meets with, he soon notices something in the manners of these “pillars of society ” which shocks him, and then he asks himself the question: “ What has brought this man to me? What in the world ‘can he have in common with us?” In most cases this ‘simple question is sufficient to put one on his guard. : When I first came to Geneva, the agent of the Russian government who had been commissioned to spy upon the refugees was well-known to all of us. He went under the title of Count; but as he had no footman and no carriage on which to emblazon his coronet and arms, he had had them embroidered on a sort of mantle which covered his tiny dog. We saw him occasionally in the cafés, with- out speaking to him; he was, in fact, an “ innocent”? who simply bought in the kiosques all the publications of the exiles, very probably adding to them such comments as he thought would please his chiefs.
Different men began to pour in, as Geneva began to fill up with refugees of the young generation; and yet, in one way or another, they also became known to us.
472 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST When a stranger appeared on our horizon, he was asked with the usual nihilist frankness about his past and his present prospects, and it soon appeared what sort of person he was. Frankness in mutual intercourse is alto gether the best way for bringing about proper relations be tween men. In this case it was invaluable. Numbers ot persons whom none of us had known or heard of in Russia — absolute strangers to the circles—came to Geneva, and many of them, a few days or even hours after their arrival, stood on the most friendly terms with the colony of refu- gees; but in some way or other the spies never succeeded in crossing the threshold of familiarity. A spy might name common acquaintances, he might give the best accounts, sometimes correct, of his past in Russia; he might possess in perfection the nihilist slang and manners, but he never could assimilate that sort of nihilist ethics which had grown up amongst the Russian youth; and this alone kept him at a distance from our colony. Spies can imitate anything else but ethics.
When I was working with Reclus, there was at Clarens one such individual, from whom we all kept aloof. We knew nothing bad about him, but we felt that he was not “ours,”? and as he tried only the more to penetrate into our society, we became suspicious of him. I never had said a word to him, and consequently he especially sought after me. Seeing that he could not approach me through the usual channels, he began to write me letters, giving me mysterious appointments for mysterious purposes in the — woods and in similar places. For fun, I once accepted his invitation and went to the spot, with a good friend follow- ing me at a distance; but the man, who probably hada — confederate, must have noticed that I was not alone, and did not appear. So I was spared the pleasure of ever say- — ing to him a single word. Besides, I worked at that time so hard that every minute of my time was taken up either AN AMUSING REPORT BY A SPY 473 with the Geography or “ Le Révolté,”’ and I entered into no conspiracies. However, we learned later on that this man used to send to the Third Section detailed reports about the supposed conversations which he had had with me, my “supposed confidences, and the terrible plots which I was manipulating at St. Petersburg against the T’sar’s life! All that was taken for ready money at St. Petersburg, and in Italy, too. When Cafiero was arrested one day in Switzerland, he was shown formidable reports of Italian spies, who warned their government that Cafiero and I, loaded with bombs, were going to enter Italy. The fact was that I never was in Italy and never had had any inten- tion of visiting the country.
In point of fact, however, the spies do not always make up reports out of whole cloth. They often tell things that are true, but all depends upon the way astory is told. We passed some most merry moments about a report which was addressed to the French government by a French spy who followed my wife and myself as we were traveling in 1881 from Paris to London. ‘The spy, probably playing a double part, as is often done, had sold that report to Roche- fort, who published it in his paper. Everything that the spy had stated was correct, — but the way he had told it!
He wrote, for instance: “I took the next compartment to the one that Kropdétkin had taken with his wife.” Quite true; he was there. We noticed him, for he had managed at once to attract our attention by his sullen, unpleasant face. ‘They spoke Russian all the time, in order not to be understood by the passengers.” Very true again; we spoke Russian, as we always do. ‘‘ When they came to Calais, they both took a bouillon.” Most correct again: we took a bouillon. But here the mysterious part of the journey begins. “After that, they both suddenly disap- peared, and I looked for them in vain, on the platform and 474 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST elsewhere; and when they reappeared, he was in disguise, | and was followed by a Russian priest, who never left him | after that until they arrived in London, where I lost sight _ of the priest.”” All that was true again. My wife hada tooth slightly aching, and I asked the permission of the | keeper of the restaurant to go to his private room, where | my wife could ease her tooth. So we had “ disappeared” — indeed; and as we had to cross the Channel, I put my soft felt hat into my pocket and put on a fur cap; I was “‘in disguise.”’ As to the mysterious priest, he was also there. He was not a Russian, but that is irrelevant: he wore at any rate the dress of the Greek priests. I saw him standing at the counter and asking something which no one understood. “ Aoua, agua,” he repeated, in a woeful tone. “Give the gentleman a glass of water,” I said to the waiter. Where- upon the priest, struck by my wonderful linguistic capacities, began to thank me for my intervention with a truly Eastern effusion. My wife took pity on him and spoke to him in different languages, but he understood none of them. It ap- peared at last that he knew a few words in one of the South Slavonian languages, and we could make out: “I am a Greek; Turkish embassy, London.”? We told him, mostly by signs, that we, too, were going to London, and that he might travel with us.
The most amusing part of the story was that I really found for him the address of the Turkish embassy even before we had reached Charing Cross. The train stopped at some station on the way, and two elegant ladies entered our already full third-class compartment. Both had news- papers in their hands. One was English, and the other— a handsome woman, who spoke good French — pretended to be English. After exchanging a few words, the latter asked me @ briile pourpoint: ‘What do you think of Count Ignatieff? ’’ and immediately after that: “ Are you. soon going to kill the new Tsar?” I was clear as to her AN AMUSING REPORT BY A SPY 475 profession from these two questions, but thinking of my priest, I said to her: “‘ Do you happen to know the address of the Turkish embassy?” ‘‘ Street so and so, number so and so,” she replied without hesitation, like a schoolgirl in aclass. ‘‘ You could, I suppose, also give the address of the Russian embassy?” I asked her, and the address hav- ing been given with the same readiness, I communicated both to the priest. When we reached Charing Cross, the lady was so obsequiously anxious to attend to my luggage, -and even to carry a heavy package herself with her gloved hands, that I finally told her, much to her surprise: “Enough of this: ladies don’t carry gentlemen’s luggage. Go away!”
But to return to my trustworthy French spy. “He alighted ‘at Charing Cross,” he wrote in his report, “but for more ‘than half an hour after the arrival of the train he did not leave the station, until he had ascertained that every one else had left it. I kept aloof in the meantime, concealing myself behind a pillar. Having ascertained that all passengers had left the platform, they both suddenly jumped into a cab. I followed them nevertheless, and overheard the address which the cabman gave at the gate to the policeman, — 12, Street So and So,—and ran after the cab. There were no cabs in the neighborhood; so I ran up to Trafalgar Square, where I got one. I then drove after him, and he alighted at the above address.”’
Every fact of it is true again, — the address and every- thing; but how mysterious it all reads. I had warned a Russian friend of my arrival, but there was a dense fog that morning, and he overslept. We waited for him half an hour, and then, leaving our luggage in the cloak-room, drove to his house.
“There they sat till two o’clock with drawn curtains, and then only a tall man came out of the house, and returned one hour later with their baggage.” Even the remark about 476 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST the curtains was correct; we had to light the gas on account of the fog, and drew down the curtains to get rid of the ugly sight of a small Islington street wrapped in a dense fog. When I was working with Elisée Reclus at Clarens, I used to go every fortnight to Geneva to see to the bringing out of “ Le Révolté.”” One day when I reached our print- ing-office, I was told that a Russian gentleman wanted to see me. He had already seen my friends, and had told them that he came to induce me to start a paper, like “Le Révolté,” in Russian. He offered for that purpose all the money that might be required. I went to meet him in a café, where he gave me a German name, — Tohnlehm, let us say, —and told me that he was a native of the Baltic provinces. He boasted of possessing a large fortune in cer- tain estates and manufactures, and he was extremely angry against the Russian government for their Russianizing schemes. On the whole he produced a somewhat indeter- minate impression, so that my friends insisted upon my accepting his offer; but I did not much like the man from first sight.
From the café he took me to his rooms in a hotel, and there he began to show less reserve, and to appear more like himself and still more unpleasant. “Don’t doubt my for- tune,’ he said to me, “I have also a capital invention. There ’s a lot of money in it. I shall patent it, and get a considerable sum of money for it, — all for the cause of the — revolution in Russia.” And he showed me, to my astonish- ment, a miserable candlestick, the originality of which was that it was awfully ugly and had three bits of wire to put — the candle in. The poorest housewife would not have cared for such a candlestick, and even if it could have been — patented, no manufacturer would have paid the patentee more than ten dollars. “A rich man placing his hopes on — such a candlestick! This man,” I thought to myself, “can never have seen better ones,’ and my opinion about him — a ee es was made up. He was no rich man at all, and the money he offered was not his own. So I bluntly told him, “ Very well, if you are so anxious to have a Russian revolution- ary paper, and hold the flattering opinion about myself that’ you have expressed, you will have to deposit your money in my name ata bank, and at my entire disposal. But I warn you that you will have absolutely nothing to do with the paper.” ‘ Of course, of course,” he said, ‘ but just see to it, and sometimes advise you, and aid you in smuggling it into Russia.” ‘‘No, nothing of the sort! You need not see me at all.” My friends thought that I ‘was too hard upon the man, but some time after that a let- ter was received from St. Petersburg warning us that we would receive the visit of a spy of the Third Section, ‘Tohnlehm by name. The candlestick had thus rendered us a good service.
_ Whether by candlesticks or something else, these people almost always betray themselves in one way or another. When we were at London in 1881, we received on a foggy ‘morning a visit from two Russians. I knew one of them by name; the other, a young man whom he recommended as his friend, was a stranger. The latter had volunteered to accompany his friend on a few days’ visit to London. As he was introduced by a friend, I had no suspicions what- ever about him; but I was very busy that day and asked another friend, who lived near by, to find them a room and ‘take them about to see London. My wife had not yet ‘seen England, either, and she went with them. In the afternoon she returned, saying to me: “ Do you know, I dis- like that man very much. Beware of him.” ‘ But why? What’s the matter?’ I asked. ‘“‘ Nothing, absolutely no- thing, but he is surely not ‘ours.’ By the way he treated the waiter in a café, and the way he handles money, | saw at once he is not ‘ ours,’ and if he is not, why should 478 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST he come to us?”’ She was so certain of the justice of her suspicions that while she performed her duties of hospital- ity, she nevertheless managed never to leave that young man alone in my study even for one minute. We had a chat, and the visitor began to exhibit himself more and more under such a low moral aspect that even his friend blushed for him, and when I asked more details about him, the explanations they both gave were still less satisfactory. We were both on our guard. In short, they left London in a couple of days, and a fortnight later I got a letter from my Russian friend, full of excuses for having intro-— duced the young man, who, they had found out at Paris, was a spy in the service of the Russian embassy. I looked then into a list of Russian secret service agents in France and Switzerland, which we refugees had received lately from the Executive Committee, they had their men everywhere at St. Petersburg, —and I found the name of that young man on the list, with one letter only altered in it.
To start a paper, subsidized by the police, with a police — agent at its head, is an old plan, and the prefect of the Paris police, Andrieux, resorted to it in 1881. I was stay- ing with Elisée Reclus in the mountains, when we received a letter from a Frenchman, or rather a Belgian, who an-— nounced to us that he was going to start an anarchist paper at Paris, and asked our collaboration. The letter, full of flatteries, produced upon us an unfavorable impression, and Reclus had, moreover, some vague recollection of having — heard the name of the writer in some unfavorable connec- — tion. We decided to refuse collaboration, and I wrote to a Paris friend that we must first of ‘all ascertain whence the money came with which the paper was going to be — started. It might come from the Orleanists, —an old trick — of the family, — and we must know its origin. My Paris” A SPURIOUS ANARCHIST PAPER 479 friend, with a workman’s straightforwardness, read that letter at a meeting at which the would-be editor of the paper was present. He simulated offense, and I had to answer several letters on this subject; but I stuck to my words: ‘If the man is in earnest, he must show us the origin of the money.”
And so he did at last. Pressed by questions, he said that the money came from his aunt, a rich lady of anti- quated opinions, who yielded, however, to his fancy of hav- ing a paper, and had parted with the money. The lady was not in France; she was staying at London. We insisted nevertheless upon having her name and address, and our friend Malatesta volunteered to see her. He went with an Italian friend who was connected with the second-hand trade in furniture. They found the lady occupying a small flat, and while Malatesta spoke to her and was more and more convinced that she was simply playing the aunt’s part in the comedy, the furniture friend, looking round at the chairs and tables, discovered that all of them had been taken the day before — probably hired —from a second-hand furniture dealer, his neighbor. The labels of the dealer were still fastened to the chairs and the tables. This did not prove much, but naturally reinforced our suspicions. I absolutely refused to have anything to do with the paper.
The paper was of an unheard-of violence; burning, assas- sination, dynamite bombs, — there was nothing but that in it. I met the man, the editor of the paper, when I went to the London congress, and the moment I saw his sullen face and heard a bit of his talk and caught a glimpse of the sort of women with whom he always went about, my opinions concerning him were settled. At the congress, during which he introduced all sorts of terrible resolutions, all present kept aloof from him; and when he insisted upon having the addresses of all anarchists throughout the world, the refusal was made in anything but a flattering manner.
480 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST To make a long story short, he was unmasked a couple of months later, and the paper was stopped forever on the © very next day. Then, a couple of years after that, the prefect of police, Andrieux, published his Memoirs, and in this book he told all about the paper which he had started, and the explosions which his agents had organized at Paris, by putting sardine-boxes filled with something under the © statue of Thiers. One can imagine the quantities of money all these things cost the French and other nations.
I might write several chapters on this subject, but I will | mention only one more story, of two adventurers at Clair- vaux.?
My wife stayed in the only inn of the little village: which has grown up under the shadow of the prison wall. One day the landlady entered her room with a message from two gentlemen, who came to the hotel and wanted to see my wife. The landlady interceded with all her elo- quence in their favor. ‘‘Oh, I know the world,” she said, ‘Cand I assure you, madame, that they are the most correct gentlemen. Nothing could be more comme-il-faut. One of them gave the name of a German officer. He is surely a baron, or a ‘milord,’ and the other is his interpreter. They know you perfectly well. The baron is going now to Africa, perhaps never to return, and he wants to see you ~ before he leaves.”’
My wife looked at the visiting card, which bore “A ~ Madame la Principesse Kropotkine. Quand & voir?” and | needed no more commentaries about the comme-il-faut of — the two gentlemen. As to the contents of the message, they were even worse than the address. Against all rules of grammar and common sense the ‘‘ baron” wrote about a mysterious communication which he had to make. She re fused point blank to receive the writer and his interpreter.
A FALSE BARON 481 A FALSE BARON 481 Thereupon the baron wrote to my wife letter upon let- ter, which she returned without opening them. All the village soon became divided into two parties, — one siding with the baron and led by the landlady, the other against him and headed, as a matter of fact, by the landlady’s husband. Quite a romance was circulated. The baron had known my wife before her marriage. He had danced with her many times at the Russian embassy in Vienna. He was still in love with her, but she, the cruel one, refused even to allow him a glimpse of her before he went upon his perilous expedition.
Then came the mysterious story of a boy, whom we were said to conceal. ‘‘ Where is their boy?” the baron wanted to know. ‘They have a son, six years old by this time, — where is he?” ‘She never would part with a boy if she had one,” the one party said. “ Yes, they have one, but they conceal him,” the other party maintained.